The progress of technology has made it possible to reduce the size of circuitry within an electronic device such as a mobile telephone and a personal digital assistant. To take advantage of a compact circuit design by reducing the overall size of the electronic device can then restrict the size of external features of the electronic device such as a user interface for receiving user inputs. For example, when a user interface includes one or more user input keys, this limitation on the size of the user interface places a restriction on the number of keys that could be provided for entering a character sequence. As a result, the keys of the electronic device are generally overloaded with multiple characters, for example, in some electronic devices, a “2” key is responsible for the roman characters “a”, “b” and “c”, as well as the numeric character “2”. Such overloading of keys would be for a specific mode of input such as a Roman language or a non-Roman language.
In an electronic device capable of processing multiple language inputs, switching between language modes is made possible by various methods, including the use of a hash (#) key. Therefore, when a user entering a mixed mode (i.e. mixed language) content wishes to switch from one mode to another, for example from a Roman language to a non-Roman language, the user would press the hash key, type the content in the non-Roman language and then by pressing the hash key again, return back to the Roman language. This process is to be repeated each time the user switches back and forth from one mode to another. Therefore, if the mixed mode content is such that the user has to switch frequently from one mode to another, the user would have to use the hash key repeatedly, though the hash key does not contribute to any mixed mode content.
Messages such as those exchanged between Chinese-speaking people oftentimes include multi-mode content. A user enters Chinese characters, numeric characters and English words or sentence fragments in the same message. This mixed-mode content requires the user to perform multiple mode switches.
Executing the mode switch is not only a relatively time consuming process but also associated with frequent usability problems. Novice users often have problems to find the right input mode to enter the desired character or get lost in a network of modal dependencies. Therefore, there is a need to facilitate entry of multi-mode content in a user-friendly manner.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present invention.